Use the Equality Calculator to Find Out If You and Your Partner Share the Same Parenting Burden.
I guess there are couples out there who feel like they are sharing household chores and childcare exactly 50-50 and are perfectly happy all the time and give each other a foot massage every night. But for most people I know, each day is a particularly exhausting combination of mole kicks, obstacle courses, and flogging. And it can be difficult, in the midst of a spanking, not to be offended if you think you are taking on more than you should.
Check out the Equally Shared Parenting website, run by Mark and Amy Vashon, authors of Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for the Next Generation of Parents . They are (obviously) supporters of equal burden sharing and to this end they offer “equality calculators” or worksheets on childcare, housekeeping, breadwinner and “independent time”, and a financial assessment calculator.
Now let me say that these worksheets are definitely not meant to be used as a weapon, a club, with which you can beat your partner after she again doesn’t remember that “cleaning up after dinner” also includes sweeping the kitchen. (Isn’t it? Isn’t it ?) They should be conversational aids and tools for discussing whether you are happy with how you distribute the load and how to adjust if you are not.
My partner and I have two children, ages seven and four, and we continually separate childcare and paid work depending on who has the most paid work at the moment. So I was curious. I printed out a scale of equality in parenting and filled it in with = for tasks that are equally divided, and either L or F for those tasks that each of us basically does. Fine, fine. But that wasn’t an exact mathematical breakdown of what each of us does, so I figured out the percentage for each task. Something I do 100%, something he does 100%. The rest are divided into 80/20, 70/30, etc.
Since I’m not good at algebra and calculus and can’t come up with a neat equation, I calculated my total percentage as follows: I gave each problem 100 points, and for every problem that is relevant to us (26 on the list), I came up with a percentage which I am responsible for: I do 100% of the “seasonal change of clothes” (so for me it is worth 100 points), for example, but about 70% of the “coordination of the game” (for me it is 70 points). Then I added all the points and divided by 2600 and found that … I take over 58% of the childcare for this model. Fair enough.
Anyway! Swaddling and feeding sucks compared to buying birthday gifts. A friend of mine pointed out that some tasks “cost” more than others — for example, toilet training is much more difficult than buying gifts — so he suggested assigning higher scores to heavier tasks.
So I’ll give “cure bed wetting” a higher number and “buy gifts” a lower number … and now I’m doing math puzzles while my partner handcrafts paper dragons with the kids. We all have strengths.
Don’t want to work with a partner on a math function? Use the worksheets as intended: to start a conversation about whether you are happy with the division of labor. And don’t forget to sweep the floor.